Sally again pivoted toward her crying:
“Why I know you perfectly well! I’ve known you all my life! And you know me just as well as I know you. Don’t you know you do?”
“Not so that it overwhelms me,” laughed Beverly.
“Where did you meet Miss Ashby?” asked Aileen who felt it was about time she came in for this wholesale discovery of “auld acquaintance.”
“Oh, I beg your pardon. This is Aileen Norman, the third girl for suite 10. She’s from Charlottesville and ought to know your family too. I reckon you know hers. Everybody does. Just like they know yours. Why your mother and mine went to Catonsville to school together. Didn’t you know that? She was Sarah Wirt then. Why I think it’s too lovely for words! And we were just as mad as fury when we started out to hunt up the new girl we had to room with this year and here you aren’t a new girl at all but one we’ve always known. Why I’m so tickled I’m foolish. Hug me Aileen or it will all seem like a dream and I’ll wake up and find we’ve got to roost with someone like that stupid Electra Sanderson, or Petty Gordon, who can’t do a thing but talk about that midshipman at Annapolis to whom she says she’s engaged, and she’s only just seventeen. She makes me tired.”
“I hope you’ll forgive us for all we said as we came down the walk. We certainly had no personal feeling as you must understand, but we were pretty well stirred up over the idea of having to begin junior year with someone we didn’t know after having had the same room-mate for three years,” explained Aileen diplomatically, striving to pour a drop or two of oil upon perturbed waters.
“I couldn’t very well feel any resentment toward you or Miss Conant when I didn’t know either of you from Eve, and I’m sorry if I seemed to. The truth is I was lonely and homesick and just ready to light into anybody. Is Miss Woodhull always so high and mighty, and Miss Baylis so like an iceberg?”
“Mercy, did you fall into her clutches the first jump? She’s the limit! Oh, Miss Woodhull’s so deadly afraid she won’t uphold the dignity of dear Bosting and her Massy Alma Mater that she almost dies under the burden, but thank goodness, we don’t see much of her, and Miss Baylis is such a fool we laugh behind her back. She’s trying to make herself solid with the Empress because she thinks she will succeed to her honors when the high and mighty lady retires. But she’s harmless because all her airs and graces are veneer. Give her one good scratch some day and you’ll see how thin the veneer really is. But come on up to No. 10, and let’s get settled. Neither Aileen nor I had any heart to do a thing until we found out who had been popped into A. Cricky, but I’m glad it’s you,” and slipping her arm through Beverly’s right one while Aileen took possession of the left, all three hurried toward the house, Sally announcing:
“We’ll introduce you to all the nice girls and we’ll call ourselves the “Three Mousquetaires.” There may not be any such word, but that doesn’t matter in the least: It’s Frenchy and I love French. And besides, we mean to band together to fight for our rights and down oppression,” asserted this young Jacobin, as arm in arm all three made their way to the pretty suite allotted to them on the second floor of the wing, for Beverly had entered Leslie Manor as a junior, her previous work under Norman Lee having well fitted her to do so.